Patient learning

摘要

"I HAVE BEEN this close to buying a nursing school." This is not a sentence you expect to hear from a startup founder. Nursing seems a world away from the hightech whizziness of Silicon Valley. And, to use a venture-capital cliche, it does not scale easily. Austen Allred, boss of Lambda School, sees things differently. His two-year-old firm matches labour supply and demand by providing fast, efficient training to potential employees. It offers five online courses that prepare candidates to write software at technology firms. Training nurses, more of which are sorely needed to care for America's ageing population, is not an illogical next step—especially when many nursing schools have to turn people away.